The immediate encounter with Jayshree Chakravarty’s art is that of entering a labyrinth created out of visual excess and layers of imagery interlaced and fossilized between the skeins/skins of paper and fabric. A closer look unfolds the panorama of her world that brings together organic materials and civilizational histories of human experience, calling upon acts of witnessing, sensing, experiencing, remembering and erasing, as she continues to evolve a language that is gestural, visceral, symbolic and intense. Her expressive exigencies highlight the impending catastrophe awaited on earth by hinting in deeper ways at the failing ecology.

While the easel at times could not contain her exploding universe, she had to find newer ways to spill-out and took recourse to scrolls, and from thereon moved to physical structures that are reminiscent of shelters- wombs, cocoons, house, webs etc. What is interesting to observe and comprehend is the creative and immersive process of working that Jayashree has evolved over the years, resulting in dissolving divides between painting, sculpture and prints, expanding the artist’s tool-box to invent and incorporate various ways of image-making in her art.

Jayashree responds with an acute sensitivity to the fragility of a beautiful world, placed at the brink of a collapse with continuously disappearing natural habitat and the dominance of man-made structures as well as materials that are corrosive and denied the regenerative powers of nature. The exhibition will highlight the evolution of the artist’s pictorial language and the workings of her mind as they get revealed through the methodology she both invents and discovers-combining heroic scale with the gentle touch of protecting, nurturing and healing, asking for a dignified presence for all beings and creatures that maintain the ecology of life on earth. 

Through the evocative richness and whirling visuality of her works, Jayashree, perhaps the humblest of her generation of artists, has consistently addressed the most pertinent question that we must all confront and reflect on – ‘how to live and let live’.

She is an extremely relevant artist whose concerns transcend geographical boundaries, cultural differences and political motives.

- Roobina Karode